During the decade of war (so far – nicht wahr?)Attorneys and their legion of the discombobulated detached detachment of inapropriate handwringers, boring assetted, worrying about the wrong thingcollective of cats in heat with defeat, retreat and repeat have been vocal with uncritical thinking critique of Great Satan and her new millennium wars.Intended consequences?

Perhaps it’s the same with War Time’s wanna be Barrack Attorneys.War has little to do with bringing ppl to justice. It is a great weapon in the arsenal to end up that way – yet organized conflict (even asymmetrical) is a means to an end. And that end is to inflict agony, pain and all kinda nasty things in disproportionate doses to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war til the hap hap happy day the other side screams “GAHH! PLEASE! STOP!”

The crazy contemporary tempation to queer the mix on Great Satan”s Most Excellent Adventures in the New Millennium betwixt criminal po po activities and warmaking is, well, decorum prohibs a common nom d’gurre – tho hideous doofusness works prett well.

The only two rule sets available are the GenCon Rules (more like a guide really) and Interpol type stuff designed to capture killers after the fact and air drop them into the legal system as defendants. GenCon is fixed up to hook up defending nat’l (and internat’l) interests and is all about breaking stuff, annihilating certain elements because of the uniform, arm band or weapon they wear. Police stuff is all about punishing ppl for prior illicit hijinkery.

Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something – killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might.: :

The problem is that internat’l law has simply failed to address the question of how a nation-state deals with forces that wage war through terrorism but are not part of any nation-state. Neither criminal law nor the laws of war apply. One of the real travesties of 9/11 was the manner in which the international legal community – the United Nations and its legal structures, the professors of international law who discuss such matters and the American legal community – could not come to grips with the tensions underlying the resulting war.:

There was an unpleasant and fairly smug view that Great Satan had violated both the rules of war and domestic legal processes, but very little attempt was made to craft a rule of warfare designed to cope with a group like al Qaeda – organized, covert, effective – that attacked a nation-state.

The reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem.Never, ever ignore the obvious either.To the government and most of the people of Great Satan, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of J’s, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Xians, Shia m”Hammedists, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

: Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy.:

Blow on this here blow back freqs

This was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist “targets,” was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some “intellectual,” however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the “root cause” of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators. 911 was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Courtney Messerschmidt

A junior studying journalism, military history and political science, Courtney was named one of 2010's "20 Hottest Women in New Media." She also created the infamous diplomatic, military and intelligence analysis site Great Satan's Girlfriend. Her expertise includes interventions, COIN, strategic uses of American power, global democracy promotion, authoritarian marginalization, gender apartheid, international relations theory and terrorism.